PhilSeven’s

Uy is the daughter of William Carlos Uy and nephew of John Carlos Uy, respectively.”

Ownership profile

Union Bank of the Philippines (UBP) listed the public in a POR as of September 30 as owners of 324,065,878 UBP common shares, or 30.62 percent of 1,058,343,929 outstanding common shares.

The same POR showed that Union Bank’s total nonpublic common shares stood at 734,278,051, equivalent to 69.38 percent, which were held by insiders.

As one of two principal stockholders, Aboitiz Equity Ventures Inc. owned 525,876,750 UBP common shares, or 49.689 percent, of which it directly owned 511,581,606 UBP common shares. The Insular Life Assurance Co. Inc. directly owned 171,597,613 UBP common shares, or 16.214 percent.

Also included among UBP’s non-public shares were 27,380,303 UBP common shares, or 2.587 percent, held by the members of the bank’s 15-person board; 2,982,650 UBP common shares, or 0.282 6,440,735 UBP common shares, or 0.609 percent.

65% stock dividend

As of September 30 this year, Philippine Seven Corp. (PSC) had 459,121,573 issued common shares, of which 686,250 common shares were held in treasury. This left the company with 458,435,323 outstanding common shares.

PhilSeven listed on the PSE website 756,418,283 common shares as outstanding, which included 297,982,960 common representing the company’s 65 percent stock dividend.

website how PSC arrived at 756,418,283 as the number of outstanding common shares. Multiplying 458,435,323 common shares by 1.65 results in 756,418,282.95, or 756,418,283 (rounded off).

Translated, 65 percent would mean increasing pro-rata the number of common shares each stockholder owned before the declaration and approval by the board.

PhilSeven used to have an authorized capital stock (ACS) of 600 million common shares. With the declaration of 65 percent stock dividend, which required more common shares that it did not have, the company held a special stockholders’ meeting on June 16, 2017 to increase its ACS to 1.6 billion common shares from 600 million common shares.

Thus, PSC’s amended Article Seven of its Articles

Due Diligencer’s take

Listed companies rarely declare stock dividend. Try clicking “dividends and rights” at the left side edge.pse.com.ph and you would know what Due Diligencer meant. As a matter of fact, several entries under “dividends and rights” are cash dividend that were due mostly preferred shares.

Yes, there are also dividend entries for common shares, but these are mostly regular dividends that are already known to market investors. The public investors need not guess if the board would approve cash dividends when they would prefer to receive stock dividends.

Among the few which distributed stock dividends were Semirara Mining and Power Corp. and PhilSeven.

Semirara increased its authorized capital to P10 billion from P3 billion. The increase was intended to accommodate the additional infusion of P3,195,859,290, the amount taken from the company’s unappropriated retained earnings.

Why capital infusion?

Since Semirara declared a 300 percent stock dividend, it has nowhere else to source the amount to than its surplus or unappropriated retained earnings, which, as of Dec. 31, 2016, amounted to P19,152,984,511,

By the way, would the public investors prefer stock dividend to cash dividend? Why? Or why not? Just asking.